A Patriot's History of the United States

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Whenever I have gone out to speak, one of the most common questions we get is, "When are you going to write a "Junior Patriot's History of the United States?" Well, it's under way. Mike Allen and I have contracted with writer Tony Williams to produce a 7th-8th grade level version of PHUSA. It will be self-published and we will have it out within the year. It will contain teacher questions, maps, and sources.

Also, My most recent book, American Entrepreneur, which is a history of American business, is now available from Amacom Press: . This is an update and revision of my 2000 book, The Entrepreneurial Adventure but in a trade version. (EA was a textbook and as such was very expensive and was not available in bookstores).

Finally, 48 Liberal Lies is now out in paperback with a bonus lie about Alger Hiss.

Friday, September 11, 2009

The buzz over SC Congressman Joe Wilson's outburst during a speech to a joint session of Congress ("You lie," when Obama said that illegals wouldn't be covered in the health non-care bill) has even some on the "right" saying, "well, he's rude, but right."

I had a wonderful lunch and discussion with a local entrepreneur and Republican who said he "cringed" when Wilson spoke up. "They'll just have more to attack us with," he said. I noted that they don't need anything to "hit us with," they lie all the time anyway. Moreover, as I now preach to every Republican audience I can find, the GOP has played nice for far too long. I'm sick to death of McCain-type reach-across-the-aisle politics. I'm ready for political combat.

Now, I understand this is really tough for some of you. For some Christians, this seems to violate the "turn the other cheek" commandment; and shouldn't we just love our enemies? Well, a) we dun turned both cheeks and then some, and b) that love is to be extended on a personal basis. But this is politics, and Jesus kept them separate. Would Jesus have shouted "You lie!" if one of the Chief Priests had stated something blatantly false? Absolutely. He called them vipers.

Our model for how to proceed in politics needs to be Saul Alinsky, not the Christ. Alinsky got it. So did Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman said when they occupied a college building, they'd issue a list of demands. When the administration met the demands, they'd just issue a new list. It wasn't about the demands! It was about demonstrating political power toward breaking down the entire structure. As I suggested a week ago, we need to get radical in terms of deconstructing the entire government bureaucracy. It needs to be a multi-front assault.

Those like my friend who abhor "bare knuckle" politics would do well to look at the Founders. Oh, they tried to reach across the aisle for almost a decade. They appealed to the King. (No go). Then they appealed to Parliament (sound of crickets chirping). Finally they went straight to the British people. (No dice). At that point, Tom Paine said "tis time to separate," and Patrick Henry said it was either liberty or death. One of the most even-tempered and concessionary of the Founders, George Washington, grimly and reluctantly---but with murderous effectiveness---took up command of the Continental Army. John Adams, no stranger to a musket, took up his pen. Hamilton and Madison strapped on their sabers. Even the Reverend Witherspoon took off his collar and brought out his musket.

When the opposition ceases to listen to you, and imposes unpopular and dangerous laws that threaten your purse and your life, Jefferson said, you have a duty to resist. We need more Joe Wilsons. ALL OF THE GOP MEMBERS SHOULD HAVE WALKED OUT OF THAT SPEECH. Because if the Republicans soon don't pay attention to the people, they will end up like the Tories after Lexington and Concord. Oh, and Jesus said, I think, that you were either with Him or against Him. We are rapidly getting that point with our elected plutocrats.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

For those who remember the heady days of the Clinton scandal, when a single, virtually unknown internet site, www.drudgereport.com, pried open the Lewinsky affair and with it, Clinton's obstruction of justice, a replay has just been put up on the big screen in the endzone.

FOX News, and specifically Glenn Beck, has almost single-handedly exposed "Green jobs czar" Van Jones as the radical communist America-hater he is, and forced his resignation. Even the Huffington-Puffington Post admitted Beck had his "first scalp on the wall." If Drudge was the "300 pound gorilla" in the mid-1990s with his ability to break news no one else could get, Beck has become the exposer-in-chief of the conservative movement in exile.

Two facts are shocking about this Jones debacle:*Number of words dedicated to Van Jones, last week, according to Byron York of the Washington Examiner (as of 9/5): Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the New York Times: 0. Total words about the Van Jones controversy in the Washington Post: 0. Total words about the Van Jones controversy on NBC Nightly News: 0. Total words about the Van Jones controversy on ABC World News: 0. Total words about the Van Jones controversy on CBS Evening News: 0.*Number of calls for Van Jones to resign by major Republican officials: John McCain: 0 Mitt Romney: 0 Mike Huckabee: 0 (that I know of---perhaps he said something on his TV show, but I can't find a headline) John Boehner: 0 Orin Hatch: 0 (but he had time to write a song honoring Ted Kennedy) Michael Steele: 0 David Brooks: 0

(Perhaps I'm wrong here, also, but I can't find that Sarah Palin issued a statement saying he needed to resign. On facebook, she urged her fans to watch Glenn Beck's show, but made no official comment last week on Jones).

Now, these are stunning numbers. In my recent memory, it's the first time ever that a major official in any administration has been forced to resign from a grass-roots movement, with no coverage or support at all in the national press except FOX; and without the slightest pressure from the so-called opposition party. Rush was away last week, and guest-host Mark Steyn hit this pretty hard, though certainly not like Glenn Beck did. Beck is emerging as public enemy number one for the Left.

What does this mean for the Tea Parties/Townhalls? MUCHO! (Little Spanish lingo there for all you illegal aliens). It means that increasingly, the grass roots is making a Gulf-War-type flanking maneuver around the entrenched obsolete Saddam line of the media and Washington elites. I can't emphasize that enough: no major Republican officials, elected or wanna-be office holders, were out front on this guy. The people, through their media, are increasingly shaping policy.

The upcoming "march on Washington" may, or may not, be a Martin Luther King-type moment, but the reality is that even among activist conservatives, they still have to work and raise families and cannot just hop off to any protest they choose to attend. My guess is that whatever the numbers on September 12, they will wildly understate the real support that is growing out here for change, and not the "hopey" stuff promised by the occupant of the Oval Office. Even John McCain, a little slow on the trigger these days, said there is a "revolution" brewing; yet even McCain continues to ignore its concerns as he announces he wants to revive amnesty.

If I have to guess, as of 9/6/09, whether we get a "health care" bill, my guess is yes. I don't know, yet, if it contains the "public option," but I do know that it will spark an even greater resentment among the tea parties, while eating into more of Obama's support among those who wanted to "just give him a chance." Well, they are seeing what happens when they give him a chance: he appoints America-hating radicals to give away their money!

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Folks, it's time we all realize something: government grows. That's what it does. We have this gauzed-lens view of the Founders like they were "small government" types. George Washington's first act was to create THREE new "cabinet level positions." Well, of course, there was no cabinet at the time. But did he think, "Gee, this will really increase the size and scope of government?" No, he thought, "We have problems and I need some help." Thomas Jefferson, Mr. Small Government, engaged the first American war overseas (and with darn good reason) and tasked his Secretary of the Treasury to create a massive "highways" bill (we'd call it, pork) that came in at about the size of the entire federal budget.

Now, look: I'm not bashing the Founders. I'm trying to show that even with the most cautious men, with the best of intentions, government takes on a life of its own, with its own "necessities" and things done "in the public interest." I think Madison said something to the effect that leaders can always come up with a reason to do what they want to do.

Recently with the Obama near-dictatorship, there has been growing and renewed interest in the Constitution. That's admirable, but it was the Constitution that allowed Washington to add cabinets, Jefferson to try to pass a massive spending bill (it was defeated), Andrew Jackson to issue more vetoes than all previous presidents (thereby GREATLY expanding the power of the president), and so on. The problem is not the Constitution---the problem is that government's nature is to grow, and unless actively, deliberately checked at all times, it will grow. The Founders thought that merely the presence of "checks and balances" would constrain it, but that has not proven so, unless those checks and balances are energized and activated by people whose overriding concern at all times is to restrain and reduce the power of government in people's lives.

Therefore, I suggest a radical approach to restoring the intentions of the Founders. Whoever hopes to deal with this on our side must absolutely have a blueprint and a strategy for actually reducing or curtailing government. It must be clever. For all Reagan's greatness, saying "I'll cut the Department of Energy and the Department of Education" was not subtle, and was stillborn.

Observe Obama. Notice how his radical crew already had the health care bill written before they came into office. These radicals have been planning for this moment for decades! Well, this is the same attitude conservatives must have for "our" time. It must be even more thoroughgoing and deliberate than the "Contract With America."

Say, for the sake of argument, Sarah Palin is the candidate in 2012 and wins. It's not enough that she says, "I'll veto any big spending or unconstitutional bills." At best, that is status quo, with monster government. There needs to be an activist, smart plan for a) consolidating almost all government functions into fewer agencies, then b) already having in place plans for reducing those agencies by the time the others "arrive." Thus, one by one the bureaucrats find themselves with, as the Japanese say, "window jobs" where they are dead ended and do no work.

"But LS," you say, "many of them don't work now." Well, unfortunately, wrong. They do work, and every scrap of paper they generate is another slice of our liberty that disappears. The # of pages in the federal register has exploded. So one of the first things you have to do is to STOP THEM FROM WORKING. I don't know the full strategy yet, but one idea might be an immediate freeze on all non-defense activities. Yeah, that would screw up a lot, and a lot of people would be angry, and that's why you have to have the plan in place LONG before you get elected. Like Obama and his henchmen now, they intend to ride out the town halls and tea parties and pass health non-care no matter what the people want, then check back in two years. People do forget.

Here's an even better idea: pass a law immediately upon taking control of Congress that instantly limits all congressmen and senators to . . . TWO STAFFERS! Imagine what a phenomenal impact that would have on our country! Who do you think wrote that stupid health non-care bill? It wasn't Pelosi or Reid. It was the staffers. Make the legislators answer their own damn phones and meet with their own constituents. If nothing else, they wouldn't have time to screw up our lives.

Whatever the solutions, conservatives better figure out that citing the Constitution and hoping for restraint on the part of un-elected officials is simply not an option. We need a radical approach to restoration that involves a carefully crafted pre-strategy that is aggressively followed immediately. Think of Reagan: he knew that crushing inflation would cause a temporary recession, and yet did it quickly with enough time to ride it out. By 1986, he even got a GOP Senate after the results came in. Liberty requires not JUST vigilance, but occasionally, a little action.

Monday, August 24, 2009

The 40th anniversary of Woodstock passed last week and, I know, a number of conservatives are saying, "Yeah? So what? Just a bunch of (quoting my mentor Rush Limbaugh) maggot-infested, dope-smoking, plastic banana, good-time rock and rollers." First, Rush says that in jest: I hope you conservatives realize that he is a former DJ with great love for the music of the 60s and early 70s, who can quote the artist, date, and probably label of every hit in those years. Another staunch conservative, former Congressman from AZ, J.D. Hayworth, was also a DJ and sports announcer in Phoenix, and a third, the late Sonny Bono, not only listened to rock regularly, but we still listen to his music!

I will come out of the closet: I was a rocker! I played for about 10 years, 4 of them on the road, and in the last band, "Rampage," I had the privilege of opening for "Steppenwolf," "Savoy Brown," and "Mother's Finest" (the latter still tours and kicks butt today.) I had hair down to my chest, and while I won't say I never did any drug, I can truthfully say that compared to most of that genre, "I never did drugs." If I inhaled, I didn't bogart any joints.

Unfortunately, I missed Woodstock, although I saw the movie perhaps 20 times. All of us did. We knew every guitar and drum lick. We could care less about a bunch of dirty, muddy, hungry hippies getting it on---we were into the music. And it is undeniable that the music was of, and from, that generation.

But it's also undeniable that Woodstock took on a mythology of its own, crafted by the Left, as an example of "peace" and "free love" and Rodney-Kingish "can't we all just get along." Ironically, much of the realistic writing about Woodstock has come from the Left. David Dalton, an acerbic writer who published a mag called The Gadfly, noted

[Woodstock] was to represent “a new stage in the psychic evolution of the world, a mass celebration of what the 1960s was all about,” and "there was a lot made of how peaceful the event was. But what else would half a million kids on grass, acid, and hog tranquilizers be? Woodstock, if anything, was the point at which psychedelics ceased being tools for experience . . . and became a means of crowd control.

Dalton went on to describe Grateful Dead guitarist (now dead, but then a drug addict) Jerry Garcia as waxing on about feeling “the presence of the invisible time travelers from the future,” apparently overlooking the reality before his eyes of “kids freaking out from megadoses of acid or almost audibly buzzing from battery-acid crank like flies trapped in a soda can."

As I wrote in my forthcoming book, Seven Events that Made America, America,

Two years later, one radical complained about the “rapes, the bad acid burns, stealing from each other, they, too were a part of the Woodstock experience . . . .” Woodstock concluded with Jimi Hendrix playing The Star Spangled Banner as masses of zonked out kids lay in mud and filth. It was a symbolic scene in so many ways. As the curtain came down, Hendrix—the concluding act---was only a year away from his own drug-induced death (joining Janis Joplin, who also performed at Woodstock, and Jim Morrison within a year). Even as his “truly apocalyptic” rendition of the national anthem blasted over a “battlefield, [with] zombies crawling over a field littered with paper cups, plastic wrappers, and half-eaten food, gnawing on corn husks, slobbering over ketchup- and mustard-smeared half-eaten hot dogs rolls, sprinkled with ants,” already the loose bond of political revolution and rock had permanently unraveled. None other than Joan Baez, the queen diva of protest songs, delivered a pragmatic assessment of the event: “it wasn’t any f__king revolution. It was a three-day period during which people were decent to each other because . . . if they weren’t, they’d all go hungry.”

Many Leftist writers tried to attach a political bent to Woodstock that simply wasn't there. When Yippie Abbie Hoffman tried to grab the mike during the Who's set, guitarist Pete Townshend smacked him over the head with his guitar, shouting, "Get the f . . . off my stage!" Hoffman came away from the event not only with a massive headache but severely disillusioned about the non-fusion of rock and revolution, asking, "Were we establishing a liberated zone or entering a detention camp?"

In reality, neither. Rock was on the verge---unbeknownst to most Americans of any political stripe or age---of helping to bring down the Iron Curtain. That's one of the "Seven Events" that will be in the new book. I won't give it away now, but rock was far more powerful as a revolutionary force behind the Berlin Wall than outside of it. And when the Wall came down, there was Rock, with the Rascals blaring out over boom boxes, "People Got to be Free." Amen, brother, and play it again, Sam.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Keep in mind my post last week that "they might not care"---that one reason so many Dems are ducking the town meetings, stacking them with union thugs, pre-admitting supporters, and all the other little commie tricks they use is an indicator that they plan to pass this no matter what. (FWIW, I ran that thought by Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, and he shared the same apprehension).

Nevertheless, it is absolutely clear that the American public does not want health non-care, and they actually like their insurance companies, and that the Dems are coming apart at the seams over this. Here is the scorecard as of this morning:

*In the Delaware Senate, a Republican took a seat held by a Democrat for 70 years.

*In FL, a House seat, held by a Republican, saw the Republican re-elected.

*Nevada polling shows Dingy Harry Reid running a full six points behind the state GOP chairwoman (whom I had never heard of). That is not a good sign for any incumbent, particularly the Majority Leader.

*Barbara Boxer is polling in the mid- to low-40s in California. This is often "Lucy" pulling away the football, but is something to watch: if well-known Dems in this overwhelmingly Dem state are struggling, it should tell us something.

*Obama is below 50% in two key states he carried in 2008, Ohio and Virginia---lower in the Old Dominion than in Ohio. But the trend is the same. People ain't happy. And early polling shows Dem. Governor Ted Strickland, who was bulletproof a year ago, slipping. Although George Voinovich is retiring (thank God), the little known Rob Portman, according to insiders is polling very well for his replacement. That would be a net conservative gain, not just a Republican "hold."

*In both Virginia and New Jersey, the GOP governor candidates have significant leads over the Dems and in VA, the Dem is absolutely tanking.

*Today's Rasmussen poll has opposition to a single-payer plan up to 57%, and support down to 32%, or essentially the core Democrat base who will almost never abandon Obama.

*On the same poll, Rasmussen, who has made a mini-reputation out of a new "approval index" that measures the "strongly approve/strongly disapprove" I think misses the forest for the trees: the real approve/disapprove now is a stunning 48-52%, or the exact opposite of the election results! This is a president whose disapproval was only 29% when he took office---a 23-point swing in some 200 days!

*You might claim that Rasmussen is a "conservative" pollster (he was pretty good in 2008), but Gallup's numbers are falling too, only a few points above Ras's. In short, the Messiah's popularity is collapsing faster than NBC's ratings. The latest Quinnipiac poll has O's number in New Jersey (!) down to only 56% *Some other good news: Dem. Senator Arlen Specter has now said the protests are not "representative of America." Yes, this is good news. People are NOT going to tolerate this kind of arrogance and it helps ensure his defeat. Ditto on Missouri's Claire McCaskill.

*The AARPies aren't even behind this bill, and Obama is rapidly losing the geezers. In fact, one poll I saw showed opposition among the over-60s was at an astonishing 67%, and the only group supporting the bill was the 20-30 age group, which stands to reason, as they won't be a) paying any of the bills or b) generally have as many health problems. But if Obama can't get the AARPies fully on board, he's in heap big trouble.

*And, the coup de grace, the "snitch" web site has completely backfired. Thousands of people have eagerly and voluntarily "turned themselves in" (you should all do the same and shut the darn thing down), and Obama had to backtrack yesterday.

Is it all enough to stop this Obamination of a bill? I don't know, but we are closer than we were a week ago.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

For those of you (us) deeply involved in the Tea Parties and attempting to contact representatives about the health (non) care bill, well, I guess I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but I had a very troubling thought:

They aren't going to listen to you. They don't care. Obama has likely made side deals with any "blue dogs" who are in vulnerable seats to ensure them government jobs if they get voted out. But regardless, Obama/Rahm Emmanuel view a loss of 30-40 seats next year as "acceptable casualties." Their goal is to put in place a "doosmday machine" that would require supermajorities of committed conservatives in the House AND Senate to dismantle. They are counting on the fact that it will be extremely difficult to ever amass such majorities.

So you don't matter. All your marching, protesting, calling, faxing, e-mailing, which is noble and commendable and in a "normal" democracy would be effective, is not going to work on this bunch. That came to me when I tried to call BOTH my senators, one Republican and one Dem, over cap and trade. Neither even had a human that would take a call: both went to voice mail that I'm sure was purged at 5:00.

This is made much, much worse by a lapdog media that is every bit as bad as the old Soviet propaganda arms, Izvestia and Pravda. Town halls? We have already seen that the Dems are moving to "controlled" settings with "submitted" questions so they don't have to even take a question they don't want, much less listen to your voice.

This is serious, serious stuff.

Marching? You would have to literally shut down Washington. It can be done, but it's tricky. I think you have to have a "planned" non-planned event, without parade or speaking permits, where 4-5 million people absolutely bring that city to a standstill. People should drive "clunkers" there and when the traffic clogs, get out and walk away. You can claim later you feared for your safety. Imagine what would happen if even 2,000 clunkers were abandoned in the roads around D.C.? The Congresscritters would be stuck! Not all of them have helos. They'd HAVE to see the crowds, deal with them in some way. So would the media. Don't have "planned speeches." Just mill around, "looking at the sights," and maybe gather when someone starts to speak :)

But we may even be beyond this kind of action. Obama is counting on the fact that once this is in place, he has three years to ride it out. So he loses 40 members of the House and 4-5 senators? There won't be enough to unravel this ball of confusion.